My impression is that what trevor refers to as “brainwashing” and “mind control” is not actually “brainwashing as popularly understood”, i. e. a precision-targeted influence that quickly and unrecognizably warps the mind of an individual. Rather, what they have in mind is a more diffuse/incremental effect, primarily noticeable at population-wide scales and with the individual effects being lesser and spread across longer time periods — but those effects nevertheless being pivotal, when it comes to the fate of movements. And this is in fact a thing that we more or less know exists, inasmuch as propaganda and optimizing for engagement are real things.
Then there’s a separate claim building up on that, a speculation that AI and the Big Data may allow to supercharge these effects into something that may start to look like brainwashing-as-popularly-understood. But I think the context provided by the first claim makes this more sensible.
It’s the general tendency I’ve somewhat noticed with trevor’s posts — they seem to have good content, but the framing/language employed has a hint of “mad conspiracy-theory rambling” that puts people off. @trevor, maybe watch out for that? E. g., I’d dial down on terms like “mind control”, replace them with more custom/respectable-looking ones. (Though I get that you may be deliberately using extreme terms to signal the perceived direness of the issue, and I can’t really say they’re inaccurate. But maybe look for a way to have your cake and eat it too?)
Yeah, I spent several years staying quiet about this because I assumed that bad things happened to people who didn’t. When I realized that that was a vague reason, and that everyone I talked to also seemed to have vague reasons for not thinking about this, I panicked and wrote a post as fast as possible by typing up handwritten notes and stitching the paragraphs together. That was a pretty terrible mistake. By the time I realized that it was longer than EY’s List of Lethalities, it was already too late, and I figured that everyone would ignore it if I didn’t focus really hard on the hook.
My impression is that what trevor refers to as “brainwashing” and “mind control” is not actually “brainwashing as popularly understood”, i. e. a precision-targeted influence that quickly and unrecognizably warps the mind of an individual. Rather, what they have in mind is a more diffuse/incremental effect, primarily noticeable at population-wide scales and with the individual effects being lesser and spread across longer time periods — but those effects nevertheless being pivotal, when it comes to the fate of movements. And this is in fact a thing that we more or less know exists, inasmuch as propaganda and optimizing for engagement are real things.
Then there’s a separate claim building up on that, a speculation that AI and the Big Data may allow to supercharge these effects into something that may start to look like brainwashing-as-popularly-understood. But I think the context provided by the first claim makes this more sensible.
It’s the general tendency I’ve somewhat noticed with trevor’s posts — they seem to have good content, but the framing/language employed has a hint of “mad conspiracy-theory rambling” that puts people off. @trevor, maybe watch out for that? E. g., I’d dial down on terms like “mind control”, replace them with more custom/respectable-looking ones. (Though I get that you may be deliberately using extreme terms to signal the perceived direness of the issue, and I can’t really say they’re inaccurate. But maybe look for a way to have your cake and eat it too?)
Yeah, I spent several years staying quiet about this because I assumed that bad things happened to people who didn’t. When I realized that that was a vague reason, and that everyone I talked to also seemed to have vague reasons for not thinking about this, I panicked and wrote a post as fast as possible by typing up handwritten notes and stitching the paragraphs together. That was a pretty terrible mistake. By the time I realized that it was longer than EY’s List of Lethalities, it was already too late, and I figured that everyone would ignore it if I didn’t focus really hard on the hook.